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Mystery
Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer

Score:
8.0 / 10

In
order to enjoy Mystery Dungeon: Shiren the Wanderer, you need to accept
one basic fact - you will die. You will die often, usually painfully and
cruelly. But dying in Shiren shouldn't be seen as a loss - rather, it's
an odd role playing game that revels more in the journey rather than the
destination.

In
Shiren the Wanderer, you take control of a little explorer wearing a
straw hat. The game itself is a Japanese rogue-like, an evolution of the
ancient computer game Rogue. It's actually a remake of a Super Famicom
game, which in turn was a sequel to a spinoff of a Dragon Quest game.
(Confusing, huh?) There are have been a handful of similar games
released in America over the years - Azure

Dreams
and Chocobo's Dungeon 2 for the Playstation, and most recently, Pokemon
Mystery Dungeon for the DS. This genre has evolved drastically through
the years, but there are a number of common elements. For starters, all
of the dungeons layouts, items and enemies are randomly generated.
Although it utilizes an overhead viewpoint similar to the Zelda

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games,
all combat is turn-based. It's all pretty simple - just walk up to an
enemy, hit the attack, and then they hit back. In addition to monitoring
your health, you also have a constantly depleting hunger gauge,
requiring that you speed up your search or procure as many fod items as
possible. Finally, the most important aspect is permadeath. Once you run
out of HP, you lose all of your weapons, items and experience, and its
back to the start of the dungeon.

This
unforgiving nature makes Shiren a tough experience, but learning to beat
the system is part of the fun, and it rewards cleverness. For example,
every few levels, you'll come across a town, where you can buy stuff,
strengthen your weapons and obtain various bits of information. Many
towns have a warehouse, which allows you to store your items. Normally
you'll lose all of the equipment if you die, but anything left in the
warehouse is kept safe, waiting for you on your next journey. Although
the game heavily discourages grinding, you can use these tricks to forge
more powerful weapons through repeated adventures.

Indeed,
it may seem harsh that you're bounced back to square one when you're
defeated, but it's not the end of the world. With each play, you
eventually learn more and more about the different items and weapons,
and discover the most efficient way to play. Shiren forces you to play
smarter, not harder, and the knowledge you gain with each successive
playthrough is far more intriguing than abstracted experience points.

The
dungeon itself is around thirty floors (not including the extremely
difficult postgame quests), and you could technically beat it in less
than a hour. Given the difficulty, you probably won't though. The first
few stages are pretty easy, but then you come across foes that will muck
up your equipment, steal your stuff, turn you into riceballs, teleport
you all over the map, and generally screw around with you as much as
possible. Trying to deal with multiple enemies is usually a recipe for
failure, so you're challenged to find creative uses for all of the items
you've (hopefully) stockpiled. In general, think of it as an old school
action game, which were short but required huge amounts of skill, rather
than a traditional RPG - it's easier to adjust to that mindset. You can
save anywhere at anytime, but this save is deleted when you reload it,
to prevent cheating.

There
is a new option to the DS version of Shiren that allows you to send out
a code whenever you die. If you give this code to another Shiren player,
they can attempt a quest to retrieve your body - if they succeed, then
you get revived. It's an interesting workaround to the constant deaths,
but it also requires patience, considering you need to wait until you
find someone - in real life or on the Internet - who's willing to help.

Plus,
each adventure holds something unique and interesting. The types of
floors you explore - and generally, the types of weapons and enemies you
find - are set, but the actual content and layout is new each time. Most
interestingly, there are a number of subquests or NPCs that randomly pop
up, occasionally giving you an extra player to tag along. This, along
with the fantastic soundtrack - composed by Dragon Quest mainstay Koichi
Sugiyama, who music fits the feudal Japan theme nicely - keeps the
dungeon crawling fresh and interesting, even as you hack through
familiar floors for the nth time.

Not
everyone is going to take a liking to Shiren - it's a game where you
need to actively seek out its pleasures, and other than some occasional
advice from wandering NPCs, you'll need educate yourself by reading FAQs
or interacting with other Shiren players. There are certainly a number
of roadblocks you'll come across, and it's all too easy to blame the
game for being too difficult, especially since there's a huge factor of
luck that comes into play. There's almost no story here too, so gamers
who look for strong narratives will be disappointed. But the game is
still fairly well balanced, and when you die, it's usually because you
made an error in judgment, or took a stupid risk. If you can come to
terms with that, Shiren is one of the most intriguing RPG experiences on
the DS, and the finest Japanese rouge-like out there. Now hopefully
someone will see fit to localize the Wii-only sequel....